Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Happy birthday, Arthur C. Clarke

An old favorite of mine, Arthur C. Clarke, has turned 90, and he's celebrated by posting a video on YouTube to greet his fans. Thanks to Brett Cox for noting this on his blog, as I otherwise would not have noticed. Clarke points out in the video that the space age is now 50 years old.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Elevated discourse from the blogosphere

Not on board yet with the received wisdom that illegal Mexican immigrants are a dire threat to the Republic? Ilana Mercer says you are a traitor. Or as she writes in her blog post, "Open borders is the litmus test for philosophical treason."

Mercer doesn't oppose ALL immigration. Elsewhere in the post, she says that emigrated from South Africa. Apparently under her policy proposal, immigrants who can submit prose samples proving the ability to sound like Ann Coulter without a sense of humor would still be admitted.

Oh, and the people who don't support Ron Paul for president are "pussies" (same posting.) There's no word yet on whether Mercer is forming a committee of female bloggers for Paul, although I think "Women Against Pussies" has kind of a nice ring to it.

Monday, December 03, 2007

The new revisionism

Noninterventionism -- the doctrine of peace and free trade -- has been the mainstream position of libertarianism for decades. It's the foreign policy position that's always been advocated by the main libertarian political party, the main libertarian think-tank and every Libertarian Party presidential candidate who comes to mind, such as Harry Browne, Ron Paul, etc.

It's easy to see why. At the end of the day, libertarianism (or classic liberalism) is the "mind your own business" doctrine. You can't really say, "I believe in minding my own business, but I support invading countries halfway around the world such as Iraq that represent no threat to the U.S., so that I can kill thousands of people who have never done me any harm."

Lately, there's been a revisionist line that insists that libertarianism is somehow inherently militaristic. That's the position taken by Eric Dondero, chairman of the "Libertarian Defense Caucus," who posted a comment to my Nov. 30 posting.

What do real libertarians believe? Here is a typical posting on the Cato Institute's blog. Here's another, by a different author.

Here is the Libertarian Party's current position on the war in Iraq, which criticizes Democrats for not moving decisively enough to get us out of the war: "The Democrats don't seem poised to do anything which will substantially change our presence in Iraq. It is time for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq as quickly as possible in a manner consistent with the with the safety of our troops."